Correspondence: Howard R. Moskowitz, Moskowitz Jacobs Inc. 1025 Westchester Avenue White Plains NY 10604, USA. Tel: +1 914 421 7400; Fax: +1 914 428 8364; e-mail: mjihrm@sprynet.com

¹specialises in dead-on delineation of product characteristics that reflect consumers' innermost wants. In addition, the business path to incorporate those attributes and entice consumers to want those products is part of her master plan. She marshalls new technologies to uncover latent consumer desires and provide correlating business opportunities. Using a system that defines and quantifies purchasers' predispositions, she develops specific strategies for reflecting consumers' innermost desires back to them. She then uses her broad-based experience to dovetail consumer wants with business processes.

²is a professor of marketing, Northeastern University and a Research Associate at the University of Florence. He researches and publishes in the areas of concept and product development, technology product markets and international marketing.

³is a consultant and professor of marketing and international business at Berkeley College in New York City. She received her doctorate from Pace University and her MBA from New York University. Prior to her academic experience, she was employed by major consumer HBA-packaged goods companies. She may be reached at minkusmck@aol.com.

⁴is President and CEO of Moskowitz Jacobs Inc., a firm he founded in 1981. He is a well-known experimental psychologist in the field of psychophysics and an inventor of world-class market research technology. His extensive speaking engagements span both scientific and market research conferences, as well as guest lectures at leading business schools. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the David R. Peryam lifetime achievement award by the American Society for Testing and Materials, the Charles Coolidge Parlin Award from the American Marketing Association, considered to be the 'Nobel Prize' of market research, for his lifetime contributions to the field and the 2006 ARF Innovation Award for the development of the most-innovative research idea.

Received 9 July 2007; Revised 9 July 2007.

Abstract

We present a framework to understand how consumers respond to eight areas of over-the-counter (OTC) healthcare, ranging from simple physical examinations as a service to medicinal shampoo as a product. The objective is to understand how the consumer processes information about healthcare such as the information that is currently available on the internet, and whether there exists a higher order set of behaviours that transcend individual OTC product groups. The study comprises a combination of self-profiling to understand the mind of the consumer, and conjoint analysis to understand the choice of features and communications. The study suggests a division of consumers into three segments: those who want a quick fix, those who want a statement of the benefit to them and those who want a detailed explanation of how and why the product works. This segmentation applies to self-medication but not preventive healthcare such as physical examinations and healthy eating, suggesting that these are separate frameworks in the consumers minds. At the macro level, the approach shows the feasibility of creating a new type of database to understand the consumer mind-set.